Having trouble writing? It may be just that you are having trouble doing two things at the same time:

1. decide what the prose should say (substance)
2. write the prose (form)

They are intimately interconnected. If you don't REALLY know what you want to say, you are going to have a hell of a time saying it. And then instead of actually writing sentences, you play with grammer and use alot of syntatic sugar until your sentence seems to have filled a respectable space (form over substance) and you can move on to the next one.

Duplicity issued a new stable version with a few bugfixes. I didn't want to wait for the Debian sid package to update so I updated it myself.

This was very simple as the Debian duplicity package uses dpatch to manage all the patches to the original source code. The patches go to debian/patches.

When the package is built debian/rules applies these patches:

dpatch apply-all

Creating a new dpatch is also automated::

# 1. create a new patch: invokes a new shell. Edit files and exit # when you're done dpatch-edit-patch <patch_name>

In a nutshell, Rules is a visual programming tool. Instead of writing code as a block of text, you configure the desired behavior via a GUI that guides you through the setup of "rule sets" which are basically stored procedures that define conditionals and actions to execute, and triggering those rulesets from various canned events.

Rules sets can can call each other immediately (watch out for infinite loops), schedule each other (or themselves) to be called later, etc.

Not too long ago, a friend told me he was quiting his day job to try going out on his own as a freelance consultant/contractor and asked for some friendly advice regarding wages and billing practices.

I may not have been the ideal person to ask, as I had never worked in the exact market my friend was going into. On the other hand, in my twenties, a few years back I did work as a computer security consultant.